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Yeah, but I'm only cynical in relation to what I see as the orthodoxies of the kind of people who post on HN.

When I say it like that, it sounds pathetic. And in fact, it is. Yet, here we are.

I love human creativity. I don't like pseudo-science, especially coming from people who believe they are above it (and fall prey to it anyway).

It is creative as long as you acknowledge it's unobtainable. But in threads like this, fantasy and reality tend to blur.

I generally see myself as an earnest person, but some kinds of earnestness read as cynical to me.

No, it doesn't seem very creative to me.

I don't think I've ever sounded so cynical in my life, but something about the way sci-fi fandom bleeds into real science really makes me deeply uncomfortable.

I'm always so alienated (sorry) by the excitement around things like this. People start fantasizing about FTL and space arks and there is just no evidence that any of that is possible, desirable, effective, anything really.

I know I'm a killjoy, but I do think there's something negative about the impact of science fiction on engineers. Like, the people who tend (no offense) to be the most literal, black and white thinkers get exposed to art and instead of processing it as the output of human creativity, they start to imagine that it's desirable or even real.

There is a fourth that the author would never mention:

Hire consultants about the problem

You don't have to wait 100 years. You can build a bridge to alleviate traffic without any understanding that the bridge will in fact generate more traffic, and then you have to widen it a few years later (which also doesn't help). I know this has happened several times in NYC and I'm sure it has happened many other places where engineering know-how far outstrips knowledge of urban planning.

How do you know that? What do you know about prehistory? Nothing. You might as well be picturing the Flintstones in your head.

You're using broadly shared but totally unsubstantiated about past humans just to argue that things are good right now.

My grandmother used to give me mix CDs as gifts. One time I asked her where she found all the music and she told me "Oh there's this amazing app called Limewire." She then taught me how to pirate music.

Am I crazy or does this just real like secular eschatology? What evidence do you have of any of this?

I don't remember Dr. Tobias Funke being into Hindutva, but it's a funny image.

That's an absurd false dichotomy. I'm assuming the historians are the cucks in your analogy? As the author points out, many of the "chuds" haven't even read translations of Greek or Latin texts, while historians can read the text in the original. The main skill historians have is exactly the strawman you've set up to knock down. They understand the limits of our knowledge of ancient societies, and the "chuds" do not.

You are holding historians to an epistemological standard that I am confident you don't hold anybody else to. Whether intentionally or not, you're muddying the waters to undermine their expertise. Why?

You should work on the ability to distinguish respect from charitability.

One can be charitable to views that one does not respect. And if one ends up being disrespectful it does not mean that they were insufficiently charitable.

I did a pandemic project of reading Dredd from the start for as long as I could. I made it through about 25 case files volumes, which took me from 1977 to the late 90s (I think).

Is Judge Dredd cyberpunk? I don't care. It's an incredible run of comics, that touches on many of the same themes as cyberpunk.

There are many people involved in Dredd over the years, but I do think John Wagner has had the rare opportunity among work for hire creators to shepherd a fictional universe over decades of real and in universe time.

Hey, that's Ian Malcolm's line in Jurassic Park!

“Let's be clear. The planet is not in jeopardy. We are in jeopardy. We haven't got the power to destroy the planet - or to save it. But we might have the power to save ourselves.”

But I don't think it's all that interesting of an argument. When people say save/destroy the Earth, they mean humanity. Call that arrogance, but it's true.

Don't let that stop you from reading the Manga.

I read Anna Karenina pretty fast. And the Power Broker. I'm a fast reader in general.

Don't take this the wrong way, but it sounds like you've become addicted to instant gratification and you've rationalized it. Up is down, down is up, and low value social media comments are actually better than reading a book by an expert.

Of course, I'm just projecting. That's what's happened to me, and I'm miserable about it.

I just speed ahead, and I always retained more than I thought I did. If I keep going, eventually I can reach a kind of flow. It doesn't matter if I missed bits here or there.

Or, you could try the opposite, and slow down. It sounds like torture, but eventually, it will become habitual.

I wonder if Pluto by Naoki Urasawa would be considered Cyberpunk? Even if it isn't, it's a must read.

How about an Elmore Leonard novel? Very digestible novels from a deceptively skilled craftsman.

I see that pedantry is more intellectually stimulating than either programming or reading!

I think the quote doesn't say what you think it says. Wittgenstein loved philosophy, and it's frustrating when people cherry pick his work to try and dunk on the entire field.

And if you accept that you are telling on yourself, then don't you think it's awfully convenient that your perspective on philosophy as a discipline is a little skewed by personal hangups?

"Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language."

If you view the story of Wittgenstein and Rorty as primarily one of leaving academia, I believe you are telling on yourself.

Sorry for the rudeness.

It is my understanding that early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus was mostly critical of logical positivism as opposed to philosophy as a whole, and that late Wittgenstein of the Investigations embraced philosophical inquiry, only abandoning the idea of language as a precise tool (and in fact embracing it).

I have heard that Kierkegaard was one of his favorite philosophers, which challenges the idea that people seem to have of Wittgenstein as a precise purely logical thinker who disdained ambiguity.

That's a common misunderstanding of Wittgenstein, and it's intellectually lazy.

In my experience, it's the opposite. People who become dependent on AI agents are avoiding human contact, and people who become managers are seeking it out (for better or worse).

That argument only works for half of my comment. I argued that people conflate the novel with the legacy, but I would also argue that people conflate the legacy with the novel. People are just as likely to see something very old and say "wow, we are the first people to think of this."

The real culprit is the naturalistic fallacy. Whatever is good must be natural and whatever is bad must be some aberration. It's more complicated than that but I think that explains 75% of it.

How do you know that? From the way you're talking about "taverns" and "elders" it sounds like you've read a lot of fantasy books and not a lot of history. You're projecting an invented past for polemical reasons, because you have no evidence either way.

Sorry to come at you so hard, but I see this behavior so commonly and it drives me nuts. I sometimes suspect that if you polled people on what aspects of contemporary society were novel and which were not, most people would have a less than 50% hit rate. Because what drives the categorization is ideology.